Among eight large firms, the portion of black employees in technical roles has risen less than a percentage point since 2014. When Democrat Maxine Waters, visited Silicon Valley in May with fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus, she was blunt about the tech industry's lack of progress hiring black employees, as she learned that black workers make up 1 or 2 percent of the workforce at several prominent tech companies. Facebook says that 3% of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2% in 2014. Only 2% of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The latest data from the U.S. government, released in 2016, reinforces the point: Blacks made up 7% of U.S. high-tech workforce, and just 3% of the total Silicon Valley workforce.